A Skeptic Visits a Spiritualist Church (and hears from his dead great aunt)

February 23, 2011

If you’re interested in the kind communication with the spirit world
you see on TV shows like Crossing Over with John Edward, I have a place
for you in Toronto! And it’s free (small donation to the church not
withstanding). This weekend I visited the
Britten Memorial Spiritualist Church
, “Canada’s oldest spiritualist church”.
Spiritualism
- a distinct term from spirituality - is the belief that deceased spirits can and do communicate with the living.

When the service started, three healers were immediately asked to
join the event’s host at the front of the room. While we in the
audience were asked to breath and meditate, people would take their turn
sitting in front of a healer to be cleansed. The healers would place
their hands on the head of an individual, then move down their back,
until coming over to their front and undertaking what looked like the
energy healing technique of
distance healing
(which apparently detects and manipulates an energy field).

Following this, the four service leaders took hold of a large red urn, holding it in the air and declaring

we are asking that the forces will take the names of
everyone in this urn, that they can be touched by the healing forces,
we ask this in the name of our father

We had just jumped from energy healing and some sort of purification
ritual I had never seen before to a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer as
though it were a regular church. To confirm that, we then sang several
flat and monotonous Christian hymns, all on the theme of forgetting
about the pains of today and reflecting only on the joyous afterlife
that god was preparing for us. Oddly, this was followed by a sermon on
how important it was
not
to obsess over the past and future, for these were uncertain, but only to focus on what could be accomplished today.

The guest of honour, Catherine MacDonald, was then invited to give the sermon. MacDonald runs a meetup group called
The Etobicoke/Toronto Mediumship/Psychic Development Group
, which is how I learned of this event. She also hosts a show called
Psychic Street Smarts Radio
.
The meetup group appears to be mainly a front to advertise her training
workshops and her radio program (not a bad idea really!). MacDonald
concluded her speech by sharing her response to the death of a member of
her family: “Hurray for her! Where’s the party? She gets to have a
great afterlife. My sisters think I’m cold”. Cold is an
understatement.

Just as I was recovering from nausea and frankly ready to leave, the
spirit communication and mediumship began! The church was smart enough
to keep the distribution of messages from deceased loved ones to the end
of the program. Otherwise, I would imagine the congregation would have
thinned out, given the banality of the proceedings to that point.

One message was conveyed to each congregant from one of their dead
family members, usually a grandfather or grandmother. Most were
variations on the theme of trying not to take the world too seriously
and to relax and balance your life. For example:

- “sometimes you feel you’re holding the world”
- “you’ve been hard on yourself. she’s telling you to cut yourself some slack.”
- “a mom or someone like a mom. you’re always having to put yourself first”
- “dad talks about you needing to take care of you. you have too many hats and need to give something up”
- “I have a female maybe a grandmother. She’s seeing a feeling of
overwhelmed, at all the healing you’re trying to do. Your folks are
still alive right?” Actually no, was the response.

When they gave vague wise-sounding advice people seemed satisfied.
There were few attempts at actual specifics, like the above, and those
were usually wrong.

- “Did your dad have a stomach problem when he passed?” No, he had a stroke. Oops, another miss.

In my case, I had a message come through from a great aunt (an “aunt
vibration”), who has been following my path, is happy I was there, and
then gave some advice about how I shouldn’t divide myself so much
between my interests in the maths and sciences, and those in the arts.
This was interesting. Of about 30 readings, mine was the only one to
reference science or math. On the other hand, I was the only one there
writing everything (including my own reading) furiously into a notebook.
Perhaps that was a strong indication of an analytical personality.

All and all it was a fun experience. I particularly enjoyed when
towards the end the third medium started to experience a form of
writer’s block. Running low on ideas, she glanced around the room,
noticed a pot of fake sunflowers on the front table, quickly fabricated a
story centred on the image of flowers generated by the spirit world,
mumbled something incoherent about flowers as a symbol for life, and
finished by glancing once more at the pot of flowers as some sort of
confirmation of the validity of what she had just invented out of whole
cloth. Unfortunately there were still several people that hadn’t been
given a message. She was only able to squeeze out one more package of
wisdom before having to yield the floor to one of the previous mediums
to return to finish off the group.

The stories weren’t exactly meaningful or specific, but, as MacDonald
admitted during her talk and in conversation with me afterword, it’s
really not about prediction, but about bringing happiness, comfort and
clarity. Clearly, most people visit a spiritualist church because
they’ve suffered a loss and desire that kind of closure. I was also
fascinated by the mix of the traditional Christian aspects of the
service, including the use of the Lord’s Prayer and the singing of hymns
(although they also had a statue of Buddha) with the ghosts’ stories.
The connection was clarified by MacDonald in an intriguing way: “we use
old hymns because your deceased family is most likely to have known
them.”

I’ve also been invited to her spiritualist workshop as apparently I
have some kind of gift to read people. I guess you could say that.

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I'm the Executive Director of the Centre for Inquiry Canada and co-host the student oriented Course of Reason podcast. As an outspoken advocate of freedom of expression and inquiry, science education, church-state separation, and equality rights for non-believers, I have the pleasure of representing freethinkers regularly on the Michael Coren Show on CTS TV as well as in the National Post's Holy Post. I also contribute to Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazines.